I have done this successfully. Mine only has four wire. The ones twisted together will be the USB data lines. You will need to work out what ones are +5V and gound. Maybe you can work it out by inspecting the board (Or the main board of the laptop).

On mine the +5 and ground wires were coloured Red and Black but the Black one was +5V. I had it around the wrong way at first and the camera got quite warm but was not damaged.

I opened my webcam, and here is a picture. that boad if guality is not good enough, I have a picture on my webserver (wount be there forever...) , sorry, no http, only https, and self signed cert.

Its hard to teke picture from that board, background and everyting are basically made with same colour. In that picture you cant see wires , so I wrote colours to that connector. I hope that you could take a look.

My biggest consearn is that if I connect it wrongly, could it destroy my laptop?

You could most likely find the ground connection by measuring with an ohm meter to the metal around the screw holes.

Also there is a ceramic capacitor near the connector (Has a + sign at one end?). It is probably the input decoupling capacitor. So check if each side of it is connected to one of the input wires.

If that works out then you should know how to connect the power supply correctly and you will be able to hook it up to a USB plug. If it won’t work when plugged in then reverse the data lines (the twisted ones).

Maybe don't try it on your favourite USB port until you confirm it is working.

I REALLY need help, my camera looks like the other guys and is a Acer "Camellia_2" from a acer laptop But it has whole different wires! it has Black, White, Lime Green, And Pinkish Red. I tryed connecting red to red, green to green, black to black and white to blue but the camera always gets hot if the usb black is attatched to any other color but the red from the camera.... i tryed other various combinations and nothing happens.. The only major thing i noticed is that when i hook the red from the usb to the black from the camera the green light turns on..., but any other combos nothing happens.....

Sorry for the very late response. The first thing you will want to do is finding the gnd wire. If you have a multimeter then you can most likely find it by checking which wire is connected (has zero resistance) to the metal rings around the screw holes.

The next thing to find is the power (+5V) connection. I think that the ceramic capacitor (the large one) close to the connector is probably some kind of filter. This means that is is connected to the ground and the power wires, since you already knew the ground you now also know the power connection. The only thing left are the data wires, if the connector is wired like most usb connectors are wired there will probably be 2 wires in between or to one side of the power and gnd wires. These will probably be the data+ and data-, the only easy way to check this is to simply connect them (and the 5V and gnd) and try it out, if it doesn't work just switch them around. (use am old computer just to be sure). The fifth wire is hopefully not connected (can you track the traces to find out if one of the wires isn't connected?)

If you have a multimeter, you should find if any wires ary connected. Its just measuring resistance (Ohm) My multimeter has also a feature for detecting if 2 wires are connected. AFAIK it send little currency to detect if it has a circuit -> you could fry your webcam if sending too much currency to wrong direction.

first there is very limited risk to damage ubs circuits as there are protected from overcurrent. So you I toke the risk eventually got it wrong (I notice in my device manager in that case that other usb items got disconnected...)

I managed to wire a wecam that I got from an old Toshiba laptop satellite: there are 5 wires:

- black AND red/brown go the black of USB (my guess is that black is 0 and that red/brown is the ground used for electrostatic isolation of the laptop)